Giving Back

Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

Dec 12, 2008 GMT

Jon maddog Hall

I was attending Latinoware, an event in Brazil held on the grounds of the Itaipu Hydro-electric plant, currently the world's largest in capacity. Each event in Brazil has its own personality, and the Latinoware event reaches out not only to the Portuguese-speaking Free Software community, but also the Spanish-speaking communities.

A highlight of this year's event was an "Olympiad" of programming, hosted by HostNet.com.br, one of the largest hosting services in Brazil, and organized by a good friend of mine, Kauê Linden, who is one of the owners.

Now Kauê is not a programmer, and he will be the first to tell you that. He is a marketing person. But early in HostNet's creation they saw the value of Free Software to their business, and now HostNet (and Kauê) are constantly looking for ways to give back to the community. The Olympiad was one way.

Imagine a room filled with young people of high school age, gathered into teams by school, working to solve problems with respect to computer science. Now also imagine blow-up plastic penguins, music, coaches, and in the midst of this a curly-haired young man in shorts and event T-shirt running around giving encouragement, solving logistical issues, and having a great time with the students (and they with him).

This was not the first time I had met Kauê. In 2007 I met him in Rio de Janeiro at a Free Software event that HostNet was sponsoring and organizing. He told me how he takes a certain amount of the profits from HostNet and put them back into events, projects and other ways to help Free Software. And of course HostNet tends to hire Free Software programmers and systems administrators.

I missed Kauê at "OpenBeach" this year (www.openbeach.org.br). I think he was too busy with his company. But next year we hope to have an expanded "program", perhaps with some high school and college students, and I think that Kauê would be a welcome addition to the OpenBeach "staff" and family.